Thunderbird 3 Search Sucks

In Thunderbird 2, if I typed ‘John’ into the search box, it instantly showed me the last few emails I’ve received from John. This was good.

In Thunderbird 3, when I type ‘John’ into the search box, it spends an eternity thinking about it1 and then tries to to show me the entire history of my email sorted by relevance. Now I’m not convinced it’s possible to sort by relevance for a term as vague as ‘John’, but when your top answer wasn’t to John, from John or about John, you have failed.

At the very least, show me the last email from John while you’re wasting all this time…

1 For Desktop apps, ‘an eternity’ is defined as the time it takes you to forget what you wanted to do in the first place.

I totally agree. When I had Thunderbird 2 and needed to search my 8 GB Gmail database for a license key sent by some vendor, I would type the vendor name and find it relatively quickly.

With Thunderbird 3, I get all kinds of other messages too. I tried to add multiple search terms to narrow the scope of the results, but instead it seems to perform a boolean OR search (not AND like it says it is) and returns even more, less relevant results.

Submitted by Scott W. Sander (not verified) on Sat, 2010-07-17 18:08.

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